“The happiness it is not having bosses and walking to work” could be the corollary of the 2,608 interviews published in The vanguard in which I have been asking for 25 years about our well-being, ambitions and frustrations professionals. A priori, having bosses does not seem related to whether or not to take the subway to the office; but the truth is that the bosses and the commute to work are just as mandatory. And, furthermore, they submit us to decisions – those of the driver and the traffic lights – of others.
The fact that our success depends on ourselves is even more gratifying than the triumph itself and makes failure less frustrating by turning it into a learning opportunity.
The more we are subjected to the decisions of others on a hierarchical scale, the more stress we suffer”
Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky summed it up like this: “Well-being is a hierarchical social gradient: the more we are subjected to other people’s decisions on a hierarchical, work or social scale, the more stress we suffer.”
Hence, year after year well-being surveys establish a directly proportional relationship between our degree of submission to a hierarchy and our frustration. The less room we have to apply our own criteria and progress with them, the less we realize ourselves. And the more we depend on the application of others, the less we are concerned with the result
Large corporations often compensate for the low salaries of their middle managers by offering them more appearance charges on the card than effective power in the company.
For this reason, both the windows, bureaucracies and regulatory excesses in the public sector, as well as the proliferation of super bosses and sub-bosses in private companies, contribute to everyone’s stress. However, large corporations often compensate for the low salaries of their middle managers by offering them more appearance charges on the card than actual power in the company. Philologists detect in the modern “too many chiefs for few Indians” the same decadent phenomenon of the treatments of authority in the empires, where the length of the “most excellent” and other “most excellent” increased, as their domains diminished.
This hierarchical hypertrophy is blamed today by researchers from the great resignation, the resignation of millions of workers from their jobs after the pandemic. “I can’t stand my bosses and I have more and more” is one of the most repeated phrases, according to the Pew Research Center, by those who prefer unemployment to submission. Pew interprets the resigners’ repeated request for “greater flexibility in my work” as “more ability to make decisions.”
Asian cultures get around the frustration inherent in obedience by encouraging herdness and ritualizing hierarchy.
But why do we put up with more unfair treatment than is necessary to survive? And why do so many give up their talent for a salary? Martin Seligman called it “learned helplessness” after demonstrating that an animal subjected to consecutive electric shocks ended up not emitting any evasive response, even if its cage was open. The guinea pigs had learned, like docile employees, to prefer the silence of the lambs to the risk of running away.
Why do we still prefer submission to cooperation? The answer is found in what we were. De Waal explained to me how bonobos exchange sex for resources and promotions with their superiors in the group, and Jordan Peterson, that our corporate submission comes from an earlier evolutionary stage: lobsters, for example, rank in 12 categories and when one first class and another, let’s say third class, fight, the loser literally blows up her brain to rebuild it at a lower level.
The Japanese graduate their inclination in the greeting according to the position of the greeted
We can see lobsters and bonobos every day in our offices, but it is impossible for us to rewire our brains after being defeated without a great deal of stress and frustration.
Western business cultures promote competitiveness and individualism in a prosocial way as a prior step to teamwork. The Asians, on the other hand, circumvent the frustration inherent in obedience by encouraging gregariousness and ritualizing the hierarchy: the Japanese graduate their inclination in greeting according to the position of the greeted. If they crouch down to the right angle, they are category 12 lobsters; but not frustrated, because they have been educated not to distinguish between their achievements and those of the group. Beta primates flutter their voices and frown in the presence of alphas.
For us, after all, happiness is moments; but more frequent when they depend on yourself
For us, after all, happiness is moments; but more frequent when they depend on yourself. And more intense when you are able to share them. This intuition that limiting yourself to obeying, on the other hand, is living halfway stimulates entrepreneurs and their resilience in the face of successes and failures that are always less intense for the employee who experiences them by delegation. And from there to “there are two ways to raise your salary; Either you get paid more or you work less” that the company can only fight with penalties or making everyone share in its benefits and its corporate prestige, or discredit.
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